Η ΟΜΟΦΥΛΟΦΙΛΙΑ ΣΤΑ ΖΩΑ 2

Can Animals Be Gay?
By Jon Mooallem (nytimes.com, 29/3/2010)
In recent years though, more biologists have been looking objectively at same-sex sexuality in animals — approaching it as real science. For Young, the existence of so many female-female albatross pairs disproved assumptions that she didn’t even realize she’d been making and, in the process, raised a chain of progressively more complicated questions. One of the prickliest, it seemed, was how a scientist is even supposed to talk about any of this, given how eager the rest of us have been to twist the sex lives of animals into allegories of our own. “This colony is literally the largest proportion of — I don’t know what the correct term is: ‘homosexual animals’? — in the world,” Young told me. “Which I’m sure some people think is a great thing, and others might think is not.”
It was a guarded understatement. Two years ago, Young decided to write a short paper with two colleagues on the female-female albatross pairs. “We were pretty careful in the original article to plainly and simply report what we found,” she said. “It’s definitely a little bit of a tricky subject, and one you want to be gentle on.” But the journal that published the paper, Biology Letters, sent out a press release a few days after the California Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. At 6 the next morning, a Fox News reporter called Young on her cellphone. The resulting story joined others, including one in this paper, and as the news ricocheted around the Internet, a stampede of online commenters alternately celebrated Young’s findings as a clear call for equality or denigrated them as “pure propaganda and selective science at its dumbest” and “an effort to humanize animals or devolve humans to the level of animals or to further an agenda.” Many pointed out that animals also rape or eat their young; was America going to tolerate that too, just because it’s “natural”?
A Denver-based publication for gay parents welcomed any and all new readers from “the extensive lesbian albatross parent community.” The conservative Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn highlighted Young’s paper on his Web site, under the heading “Your Tax Dollars at Work,” even though her study of the female-female pairs was not actually federally financed. Stephen Colbert warned on Comedy Central that “albatresbians” were threatening American family values with their “Sappho-avian agenda.” A gay rights advocate e-mailed Young, asking her to fly a rainbow flag above each female-female nest, to identify them and show solidarity. Even now, the first thing everyone wants to know from Young — sometimes the only thing — is, what do these lesbian albatrosses say about us?
“I don’t answer that question,” she told me.
A female Laysan albatross is physically capable of laying only one egg per year — that’s just how it’s built. Nevertheless, since as early as 1919, biologists have periodically found nests of albatrosses (and similar species of birds) with two eggs inside them, or with a second egg just outside, as if it had rolled out. (This will inevitably happen; there’s simply not enough room in the nest for two eggs and one Laysan albatross.) Scientists have a term for the phenomenon of extra eggs in a nest: a “supernormal clutch.” But in the case of the albatross, they never had a watertight explanation.
In the early 1960s, one ornithologist tried to put the whole cumbersome mystery to rest by asserting that some of those female birds must simply be able to lay multiple eggs. The claim was apparently based on sketchy data, but supernormal clutches were so rare that it was hard to rack up enough observations to disprove the hypothesis. Real progress was finally made in 1968, when Harvey Fisher, a dean of midcentury albatross science, reported on seven years of daily observations made at 3,440 different nests on the Midway atoll in the middle of the Pacific. Fisher concluded that “two eggs in a nest are an indication that two females used the nest, although at different times.” He was describing “egg dumping,” whereby, for example, an inexperienced female accidentally lays her egg in the wrong nest. From then on, egg dumping was a default explanation for supernormal clutches in albatrosses. After all, Fisher had also declared that “promiscuity, polygamy and polyandry are unknown in this species.” Lesbianism apparently never occurred to anyone — even enough to be cursorily dismissed. As Brenda Zaun recently told me, “It never dawned on anyone to sex the birds.”
Zaun, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was studying a Laysan colony on Kauai 40 years after Fisher’s publication. She realized that certain nests there seemed to wind up with two eggs in them year after year; the distribution of the supernormal clutches wasn’t random, as it would presumably be if it were caused exclusively by egg dumping. On a hunch, Zaun pulled feathers from a sample of the breeding pairs associated with two-egg nests and sent them to Lindsay Young, asking her to draw DNA from the feathers and genetically determine the sexes of those birds in her lab. When the results showed that every bird was female, Young figured she’d messed up. So she did it again — and got the same result. Then she genetically sexed every bird at Kaena Point. “Where it wasn’t totally clear, or I worried that maybe I mixed up the sample, I actually went back into the field and took new blood samples to do it again,” Young told me. In the end, she genetically sexed the birds in her lab four times, just to be sure. She found that 39 of the 125 nests at Kaena Point since 2004 belonged to female-female pairs, including more than 20 nests in which she’d never noticed a supernormal clutch. It seemed that certain females were somehow finding opportunities to quickly copulate with males but incubating their eggs — and doing everything else an albatross does while at the colony — with other females.
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